Finding a Home: Inequities
Elizabeth B. Pearce; Carla Medel; Katherine Hemlock; and Shonna Dempsey
Finding a place to call “home” is important. Living in a place that supports access to outdoor spaces, a feeling of security, effective schools, transportation, food and other resources and the potential for community are quality factors that affect a family’s abilities to function effectively and efficiently. We might call these “livable environments.”
Home ownership has been and is still the most basic and viable way to accrue wealth in the United States. Access to home ownership is important to families for both livability and financial investment purposes. Uncovering the inequities in access to home ownership is critical to understanding the well-being of families in the United States.
Power and the American Dream: Home Ownership
The government and financial organizations both hold substantial power in the United States. Together, they affect how homes are purchased and who can purchase them. Although we know that race is a social construction, it is still used as an identifying feature for families, and has been used by these systems to control home purchases and to segregate living areas. We will discuss housing from the perspective of racial-ethnic groups affected by these regulations and practices.
As noted above, households that rent homes rather than buy are on the increase; more people are renting now than at any time in the last fifty years. This is not due to lack of desire to own a home; in a 2016 Pew Research Center Survey, 72% of renters said that they desire to own a home.[1] Denial rates for mortgages continue to be higher for Black and Hispanic applicants. When they are approved, they tend to have higher monthly payments, which increases the cost burden on families. This is typically due to having fewer financial resources with which to make a down payment.[2]
While it may be obvious that home ownership increases stability and enables individuals and families to accrue wealth, it is also true that home ownership has a significant effect on the life satisfaction of low-income people. Home buyers have been found to have higher levels of life satisfaction and may also have increased self-esteem and a sense of control compared to renters.[3] It is impossible to talk about lower rates of home ownership amongst minoritized groups without discussing the practices of intentional segregation and gouging enacted by the federal government, lending institutions, local governments and housing covenants enacted following the legal end of slavery in the United States.
Redlining
Redlining is the discriminatory practice of refusing loans to creditworthy applicants in neighborhoods that banks deem undesirable or racially occupied. Although homeownership became an emblem of the American citizenship and the American dream during the 20th century, Blacks and other nationalities were specifically limited in their abilities to purchase homes. Both the f